At the first Cloud Coffee Coffee bar, adjacent to the Other Half beer garden in downtown Buffalo, New York. All images courtesy of Cloud Cover Coffee.
It’s clear skies ahead for Cloud Cover Coffee with the opening of its first brick-and-mortar cafe in downtown Buffalo, New York.
Nestled in a corner of an expansive microbrewery and beer garden run by Cloud Cover’s parent company, Other Half Brewing, the neon-lit coffee have has its own entrance on the ground floor of the Seneca One Tower.
Bunn equipment produces batches of drip coffee, while espresso comes through a 2-group La Marzocco Linea espresso machine, forming the basis for the straightforward coffee menu that Cloud Cover rounds out with iced drinks, cold brew and manual pourovers.
A pastry case is stocked daily with locally baked goods, while a full slate of pub grub is available throughout the day from the adjoining the brewpub.
Sam Richardson, Matt Monahan, and Andrew Burman founded the Other Half Brewing Company in Brooklyn, New York, in 2014. Since then, the company has opened additional locations in New York City, Washington D.C., Philadelphia and Bloomfield, New York.
The Buffalo location opened in 2022 as an indoor beer garden and bottle shop at Seneca One before relocating last year to a larger space on the opposite side of downtown skyscraper.
In its newer digs, Other Half’s industrial vibe and bold lighting center around a 20-tap bar and full kitchen. Customers can purchase freshly canned beer to go or hang out and play pinball with views to a 12-foot video wall. In warm weather, the location transforms into a large beer garden with bags and other yard games.
After introducing a number of coffee stouts, Other Half officially launched Cloud Cover Coffee as a sibling brand in 2022, offering whole bean, house-roasted, single-origin coffees online.
Cloud Cover coffees have since been incorporated into a steady stream of increasingly coffee-forward Other Half stouts. The recent Bang On! stout featured a dash of Madagascar vanilla and a coffee from the Keramo region within Sidama, Ethiopia.
With the coffee bar now in operation, beverage inspiration now flows both ways between beer and coffee.
“We have been working on some new collabs,” Andrew Burman told Daily Coffee News. “Right now, we are doing some fun [coffee] drinks based on our beers and stouts. We made a Banana Macadamia Cold brew based on our Bananaversary stout.”
Sam Richardson handles the sourcing and roast profiling of all Cloud Cover coffees. Though production roasting is done on shared Diedrich roasting equipment at the Red Hook Coffee Roasters roastery in Brooklyn, the primary front for Cloud Cover coffees is on the shore of Lake Erie.
“Right now we are concentrating on just Buffalo,” Burman said. “We are focusing on how we can make the best experience for our customers in Buffalo, looking for interesting varieties and techniques to help push our customer experience in an exciting direction.”
Cloud Cover Coffee is located at 1 Seneca St in Buffalo. Comments? Questions? News to share? Contact DCN’s editors here. For all the latest coffee industry news, subscribe to the DCN newsletter.
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Howard Bryman
Howard Bryman is the associate editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine. He is based in Portland, Oregon.
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